FRONTIERS OF ZOOLOGYDale A. Drinnon has been a researcher in the field of Cryptozoology for the past 30+ years and has corresponded with Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson. He has a degree in Anthropology from Indiana University and is a freelance artist and writer. Motto: "I would rather be right and entirely alone than wrong in the company with all the rest of the world"--Ambroise Pare', "the father of modern surgery", in his refutation of fake unicorn horns.

Wednesday, 7 March 2012

New Article On Neanderthal Noses

...providing a much-needed check on mythopoeic
archaeological inference, but also on occasion commenting on the important
discoveries of the day. Every effort is made to keep the invective to a dull
roar. Best plug your ears. Welcome to the virtual-reality playground of the
ditched and fameless!

What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to
believe,not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by
hard evidencerigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence.—Carl Sagan

Face-off: Neanderthal Nouveau and Me

Either I need a better
napkin, the back of which to use forillustration purposes, or I need a John Gurche to work some fresh magic with my
working hypothesis that Neanderthal carnivory was behind theautapomorhphies* of the
mid-face, specifically the larger-than-life nasal aperture and the eye orbits
that look like goggles. In this brief addition to my previous two posts on this
matter, I will embarrass myself silly while trying to depict the Neanderthal
nose in side view, compared to that of people like you and me. First, I did a quick
reconnaissance at Google
image to find the size comparison seen in the first illustration shown
below. Neanderthals had only a slightly larger brain and brain case than we did,
which is clear from the photo. However, if you look at the distance between the
forward-most point of the browridge and that of the upper jaw, you can easily
see the great size difference. The Neanderthal nose and upper lip were on the
order of twice as tall as ours!

Size comparison of a Neanderthal and a modern human to
scale (image gleaned from the web, no ascription was
found).

I couldn't use the above image for comparison, because
as with so many Neanderthal fossils, the nasal bones were missing in this one
and the entire area is a plaster reconstruction. Instead I went back to the
Shanidar 5 skull, which retains the nasal bones, and then attempted to show the
generalized (European) modern human face in relative proportions.

Shanidar 5 reconstruction (after Trinkaus 1983) and
Gray's modern human to same scale as above.

Now the process gets embarrassing. After downloading GIMP
(free, open-source photo imaging software) at the urging of a friend, and making
a number of false starts, I managed to (roughly) describe the outline of the
Neanderthal and modern human faces based on the above skeletal outlines. I
attempted, as best I could, to model the eyes, nasal bones, and nares as
honestly as I could. The results are meekly presented below. Have a look at the
faces, which are to scale, and for which the soft tissue has been approximated
in both cases. [I even tilted the Neanderthal below the Frankfurt
plane** because I didn't want to accidentally overemphasize the near
horizontality of the bridge in the Shandiar 5 specimen, the cranial outline of
which I couldn't reconcile with that of the comparative photo, at the top.
However, I believe that a more horizontal bridge is actually the case, which
would result in a far-more vertical naris. I've also downplayed the vertical
size difference, again because I didn't want to appear to be making too much of
a trait that's likely to vary considerably within and between species. In all
likelihood the two faces would be even more disproportionate.]

Gargett's embarrassingly poor attempt to model the
Neanderthal upper face and that of a modern human using the Shanidar 5
reconstruction and Gray's modern human using the same relative size as in the
first illustration above.

Now have a look at my
(admittedly crude) illustration of this face from the front.

It's likely that you wouldn't
buy a used car from this man. Put a hat on him and you'd still think twice about
giving him a ride in your car, unless you have one of those K-9 Corps-type
meshes between you and him. And you'd probably be right to do so, if, that is,
you wanted to keep all of your limbs intact, especially if he likes the way you
smell! I
think you'd also agree that there's a considerable difference between the
Neanderthal profile that I've constructed and any of the artistic attempts that
I'vestolenborrowed from the web for this
exercise, and which are laid out below. I would go so far as to say that the
differences would warrant a separate generic status for this hominid, but then
I'm not a flint-knapper member of the club that gets to do that
fun stuff.

You'll probably recognize the Australian Museum's model
in the upper left. The lower left I'm calling the New Age Neanderthal. Upper
right is, I think, a game rendering. And the lower right is a fairly
traditional, shuffling brute, 'hairy ape'
concept.

* This is me using a bit of biological
anthropology jargon so the grown-ups will know that I can walk
the talkwalk the walk walk and chew bubble-gum at the
same time. So are all the other high-falutin' words that I use. It's important
to switch linguistic code when you're trying to get in with the cool
kids.** The
Frankfurt Plane is the specified position of the head in what's known as the
correct anatomical position.

Hey there friend, you used my Neanderthal construction head-on to do the
blowup of the features!
Your article is quite good, I'd like to quote it,
if I may.
And if you need me to morph you another facial reconstruction,
I'm ready to do it for you.

Subsequently we both agreed that we had both independantly done versions of the Australian Museum's Neanderthal by mirroring the sides and adding black circles in the nostrils. I said this must be evidence of the "Psychic Unity" theory. The nose still isn't quite right but it does go to show where the Iceman got his "Pugged" look: and most importantly, there you have those "Big Eyes" that all the witnesses are so insistant about. They're HUGE!

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